Y’all should all go read The Sandbox, which is the new online blog forum provided by Doonesbury for the purpose of allowing our military personal to write about their experiences in a space completely free of censorship.
Worth reading, no matter what your political leanings might be…
So, the somewhat fun part of this first. I have to/get to go buy a car this afternoon. It’s actually a replacement for Kirsten’s car, not mine, so it’s not a sexy little Audi. We’re going for a Volvo XC70 instead. It’s a nice dark blue color and has just about every extra you could want.
Here are the things that are freaking me out. First of all, the sticker is like $43K which seems pretty insane for a car. However, pretty much all cars are expensive and Volvos are nice. The thing that’s really causing me problems though is that, according to all the research that I’ve done, the invoice price on this car should be right around $40K, but we’ve negotiated them down to $35.5. Why in the fuck would they do that? Is there something I’m just completely misunderstanding about how much the car cost them?
So, gimme your thoughts.
Right now, on CCTV 4 (the Chinese national TV channel that’s included on campus cable), they’re showing some kind of news or talk program (sort of like the political discussion stuff on PBS) that’s featuring a couple of professorial-looking fellows using some diagrams, charts, and film clips of what appear to be military training exercises to describe what I’m guessing are invasion plans (?!?) or scenarios (a little less worrisome, I suppose) for Taiwan.
I’m not up on my Mandarin (although I do catch the occasional “Taiwan” and “Taipei”, or at least what sounds like them), so I’d have to default to Qun on this one, but here’s to hoping they’re just talking in hypotheticals, rather than offering outright predictions based on the current situation… 
Disclaimer: I don’t intend to be alarmist (especially since I suspect the status quo in this case will remain for a while yet), nor do I really known enough to have a valid opinion on the whole China-and-Taiwan situation, other than the very general, “war is a bad thing” perspective, and I don’t think I’m gullible enough to entertain any arguments to the contrary of that.
Alright, so I’ve been meaning to get at these for a week now, but it just kept getting further down the list…
In the last couple of weeks, I had the pleasure of seeing two memorable acts live. First, there was Old Crow Medicine Show at the Somerville Theatre, a very cool little intimate venue in Davis Square down in Somerville, MA, last Thursday (9/28). Then, there was Roseanne Cash (yes, John’s daughter) at the HOP this Saturday (10/7).
The brave may read on for details, if’n they’re so inclined…
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This previously blank post has been brought to you by the un-Tim-friendly standard operating mode of the WordPress interface that allowed him to accidentally post an empty message after he saved his concert post, which is what he actually wanted to post. Yeah, that’s definitely it. Yeah, that, and the letters W, T, and F, and the number ?
